Blok M diary, September 2003

The Sunday Night from Hell

I’m sitting in the downstairs bar in D’s Place. It’s a quiet Sunday evening, just a few guys chatting at the bar and a couple of girls enjoying a drink together. My handphone warbles, it’s my good friend Soppy (of pissedupasia.com fame, for those who don’t know that excellent and idiosyncratic web site) sending me an SMS - or, more correctly, an SOS. The poor chap’s in Sportsmans, bored out of his skull, asking me where I am. Being too lazy to shuffle next door and greet him, I return his SMS - a few moments later, he rolls into D’s, a desperate man on a desperate mission.

We play a few games of pool while Soppy completes his early evening pump-priming of ale, and the Reveller lights up his first cigar of the evening. We’re both right off form, so we decide to modify the rules in order not to look complete prats to the few onlookers. Soppy’s new rule is that any ball going into any pocket counts, the only proviso being it’s his, and not mine. It doesn’t matter what gets hit first, as long as something goes down. Sinking a few balls in quick succession the lad brightens visibly and settles into a mellower mood.

Now if there’s one thing that Soppy can’t resist, it’s a good, solid, calorie-crammed, fat-saturated meat pie with all the trimmings and lashings of gravy. The Reveller envies him his cast-iron digestive system, and watches a little wistfully as he summons a waitress and orders his pie. Our game has just reached an all-time nadir when his collation appears, a cholesterol nightmare if ever there was one. He beams with joy - it’s as though the chap has just had a beatific vision, some transcendental experience, a divine revelation. Tucking into the pie with practiced expertise, the Reveller reflects that he’d have made a fine brain-surgeon and has obviously missed his métier.

As he scrapes the last traces of gravy from his plate, we decide to go to the upstairs bar and see who’s around. The place is cold, dark, and absolutely dead. It occurs to the Reveller that it’d be a perfect place to train astronauts in boredom-endurance for journeys to distant planets, or submariners who have to spend weeks lurking in the tenebrous depths below the Arctic ice shelf. The music is a random compilation of golden oldies, weird modern vocal stuff and tuneless thumpings - all belting out at full volume, in spite of the bar being almost empty. The girls don’t like it, most of the guys don’t like it, so why does the management persist in inflicting this atonal junk on everybody? If the Reveller ever abandons D’s Place, it’ll be the bad, loud music that drives him out.

The evening drags on, and the girls arrive in dribs and drabs. As they wander aimlessly into the bar, the Reveller observes that they have all the joie de vivre of a funeral procession. Settling into their regular spots, the dear things drop into frozen, lifeless postures - the scene is eerily reminiscent of an engraving by the French artist Gustave Dor&eacute

Even the appearance of one of Soppy’s erstwhile conquests fails to cheer the lad up, so he settles his bill and forlornly ambles off to try his luck elsewhere. The Reveller, incurable optimist, is a great believer in the Micawber dictum that something will always turn up. Alas, this evening is the exception that proves the rule, and things go from bad to worse. A valiant attempt to cheer himself up with a few Carlsbergs fails miserably, so the Reveller decides to cut his losses and return home. As he guns up his bike and bounces in and out of the famous Pelatehan potholes, it starts to drizzle. That, really, says it all.

Of geese and golden eggs

Monday night is always a good night for conversation - the weekend feeding frenzy is over, the guys are back at work, and it’s the regulars who turn up for a sociable evening with their mates. The Reveller is chatting to an acquaintance at the bar a couple of Mondays back, when a group of girls walk in. They wave coyly at the him, but he pointedly ignores them and turns back to his beer. He then explains that he’s fed up to the back teeth with Jalan Pelatehan girls, because they’re aggressive and greedy. Complaining bitterly about the price/performance ratio, he tells me that for the last few weeks he’s found much nicer company in Lintas Melawai, where the girls are more fun and more realistic about remuneration.

What concerns the Reveller - and should ring loud alarm bells to the bar managers on the street - is that this is not an isolated observation. It’s being said more and more, especially by the guys who’ve been around for a few years and know the ropes.

Now the Reveller has a well-connected informant in Buncit, his own personal ‘Deep Throat’, and she feeds him all the gossip and tittle-tattle from the little colony where most of the Blok M girls live. The economics of life there are stark and simple. The rent for a single room with basic facilities is between Rp 100,000 and Rp 200,000; a small pad with a couple of rooms, a kitchen area and internal WC costs from Rp 300,000 and Rp 400,000 on average, and is usually shared by two or three girls. This means that a girl has to score once to pay her rent, once to pay for her food and necessities for the month, once to send some money back to the family, and once to buy clothing and makeup. Anything else goes into a bit of jewellery, or that special hair-do. To live comfortably, then, a girl needs a hit rate of at least one per week. But the average rate, for many of the girls, is once or twice a month, which leaves them seriously short.

So what do the girls do to make up the deficit? They work out that if they double the rate, they’ll make the required total with two hits instead of four. The mathematical logic is impeccable, but real life doesn’t pan out like that. They get a reputation for being greedy and over-priced, and can count themselves lucky if they get even one hit per month, let alone two or more. As I keep telling them, if they halve the rate they’ll actually do much better, as they’ll get more guys on a regular basis and almost certainly exceed their monthly basic requirement.

The Reveller’s advice to the guys? Don’t tolerate poor performance - and pack them off with a flea in their ear if they demand more than Rp 150,000 - Rp 200,000 for a quickie (unless, of course, you’re happy to pay more). But most of all, if you’re not rolling in money and have to watch your budget, think twice before taking any girl from Jalan Pelatehan, and D’s Place in particular. Go down to Lintas Melawai instead, and it’s odds-on that you’ll find what you’re looking for if you’re prepared to hang out until between one and two a.m.

Caveat Emptor

It’s Wednesday, free beer night, and the crew is mellowing nicely. I get chatting about the girls, and one of the Reveller’s friends relates a sad story about a guy he knew who falls for a very sweet girl, and after going steady with her for the best part of a year rents and furnishes a house for them to live in together. He tells her that he wants to get married, and plans to take her with him back to Australia to meet his parents.

What he doesn’t know is that she’s already married, and supporting her husband (unemployed, of course) back in Buncit. He’s doing very nicely, thank you, out of the deal - a new motor bike, flashy clothes, and money for gambling with his mates. Sadly but inevitably it gradually dawns on the guy that he’s a dupe, being taken for all she can coax out of him. Stories about money for her mother’s hospital operation, university fees for her brilliant (but impoverished) brother, school fees for her cousins (who depend upon her), and a whole litany of similar ‘good causes’, begin to wear thin. Then one day he learns the truth from one of his friends, whose own girlfriend spills the beans. He’s gutted, and never fully recovers from the experience.

The Reveller’s ‘Deep Throat’ tells him that almost all the girls who frequent the bars in Jalan Pelatehan are married, or have live-in boyfriends. Fine, there’s nothing wrong with that - but when the girls spin a yarn about living on their own, being unattached and available, and ready to move in with a guy because they’ve really fallen for him, that’s right out of order. It’s deceit, pure and simple.

Now the great majority of the girls in Blok M are honest, kind-hearted souls. OK, some of them may overcharge and underperform, but they never bullshit the guys. As my friend ruefully remarks, it’s a sad case of the proverbial bad apple spoiling the rest of the barrel.

The Reveller’s advice to guys contemplating shacking up with a girl on a full-time basis? Take off the blinkers for a while, ask around, do some checking, make sure that she’s on the level. As the Reveller observed many moons ago, having an Indonesian girlfriend can be a bit like buying into a timeshare property.

Sweet Friday

The Reveller rolls up at D’s Place a fair bit later than usual and promptly settles into his dietary regime of tequila and soda - drinking time is a precious commodity, and there’s some catching up to do. It’s the usual Friday night free-for-all downstairs, so off upstairs to see what the tide’s washed up.

Wonder of wonders, there’s a marvellous crowd in the upper bar - carousing away the night with that Bohemian abandonment which marks out the true reveller from the casual toper. Setting up his base camp next to the disco rather than in his habitual bar seat, the Reveller feels a deep sense of contentment descending on him as he sips his latest tipple, Campari soda. It’s a refreshing drink, sharp and slightly bitter, and evocative of lazy summer days spent wandering among the dunes and pines of a small French seaside town.

As the girls spot me in my corner they grin and flash their eyes, waving greetings across the sea of gyrating bodies. Some of them trip across to say hello, chat for a couple of minutes, then drift back into the melee. Suddenly a larger figure walks across in greeting - a guy I haven’t seen for nigh on five years, last observed wandering out of Top Gun with four girls in tow. Yes, he’s a reveller par excellence, a role-model for any would-be reveller. We catch up on the news, ask about mutual friends, and the Reveller updates him on the girls.

Now he hasn’t been to Lintas Melawai for quite some time, and is visibly shocked to hear that the place is closing down in December. ‘But the girls, the sleaze, the dreadful service, that ghastly music - where are the guys going to go in the early hours of the morning?’ he plaintively asks, a rhetorical question to which there is no answer. Inevitably, we gravitate to LM within the hour, a sort of belated homage to decadence.

And it’s a vintage night down in Melawai - the music has never been so raucously loud and tuneless, the girls so stunning and vivacious, the guys so expansive and lecherous, the bar staff so cheerfully incompetent. Yes, reflects the Reveller, this is twenty-four-carat, rock-solid, one-hundred-percent, pure decadence. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

After a couple of hours of soaking up the ambience and lightly flirting with what seems like a never-ending stream of old flames, the Reveller calls it a day and bids a wistful farewell to the "meaner beauties of the night" (to quote the poet Andrew Marvell), points the wheels in the general direction of home, and rides off a happy and contented bunny.